The exam system for pupils at the UK's secondary schools is being overhauled and Keats was mentioned in the changes today:

Teenagers will be made to learn 300 lines of poetry under a major overhaul of English GCSEs.Pupils will have to study at least 15 poems by five different poets, including works by Romantic Poets such as Wordsworth, Byron and Keats.

It's sounds like they're setting a greater emphasis on learning poems by heart and making studying the work of certain poets compulsory.

Cath you beat me to it! I heard something of this on Classic FM radio earlier then just seen the Daily Mail article. Actually still reading it! A good thing is you ask me- literature and poety enriches the soul and mind. I'd have loved to have studied all this at school. I hope this will bring some culture into young lives!

And while they are it it- they ought to bring classical music lessons into state comprehensive schools as well- a bit of Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin would do them good.

John....you did not live to see-who we are because of what you left,what it is we are in what we make of you.Peter Sanson, 1995.

This smacks of mistaken paternalistic Tory snobbery. Much as the teaching of English literature needs to be changed, this will not help.

You can't turn the clock back to the old Victorian 'take your medicine it's good for you kind of education', the world has moved on, Tory grandees millionaire snobs, unfortunately have not.

Kids must be inspired by great teachers to seek out and read themselves poetry and literature, not force-fed down their throats by an overbearing and patronising elite.

This is the way to totally wreck another generation's appreciation of poetry.

Much as I would love to see Keats and his contemporaries taught in schools, pushing it onto uninterested kids and learning by rote in the old style will put off more than any it will inspire, I know it would me if I were at school now.

I don't think it's right that you can't appreciate them until then, but they. Retain my winter appreciate it being foisted upon them and told to study something that's good for you, like medicine. I really thought those days were gone and a new era had begun. This present British government seeks to drag education back into some mythic perfect Victorian model of rod and rote.

So glad that Keats will be covered in Lit. classes. You wouldn't believe the Brits I've met who have no idea who John Keats was or what he wrote.

However, in my opinion, there's a lot of difference between rote learning and learning something by heart.

Rote learning is what we did in grade school. We memorized "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and then spent a whole suffocating, boring week discussing "what the poet really meant." Ugh!! Really, how much ink can you spill parsing the real meaning of "beauty is truth, truth beauty. . ."?

Learning by heart is what I did with "To Autumn." Learning this perfect poem by heart meant it was permanently portable, that I could carry it with me wherever I went. The rhythm of the words recalled while I walk in park on an achingly beautiful fall day is a profoundly spiritual experience.

Yeah. By rote and by heart are as far apart as things can get. It takes a talented teacher to know the difference. It takes a talented teacher excite his/her students about poetry.

"The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence."Wallace Stevens

It also takes a curriculum and a flexible education system to allow and encourage teachers to actually teach which is a problem of league-table and result-focused education today where everything is micromanaged and assessed to death art and poetry is squeezed out completely as unnecessary and un-utilitarian.

The arts, in general, are being short changed. Music and art budgets are cut in school systems' budgets as wasteful, unnecessary fluff. I once saw an elementary school teacher, feeling obliged to justify music education, give a speech about how kids who were literate in music did better in mathematics. I felt like jumping up and down and yelling that music education should be an end in itself.

"The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence."Wallace Stevens